Phil Wilkinson has a great post on “The Feature Arms Race” over at the Crowdstorm Blog. He refers to the same “Creating Passionate Users” blog by Kathy Sierra that Donncha linked to recently too.

Phil’s main point is that we can all get caught up studying the competition and playing keep up with the Joneses rather than concentrating on what we do best “creating features that our users really want and can learn to use quickly”. Once you lose sight of your customers you are in serious trouble.

I’ve fallen into that trap a few times but luckily I always found myself very quickly chasing my tail and giving up in frustration and getting back to building what I think our customers will want.

Whilst we have lots of traditional competition, we have no serious competition yet using our approach. I’ll be very disappointed if we don’t have at least three or four serious competitors taking our tack by this time next year. I don’t believe we will be in the features game in order to gain and keep our customers attention. As long as our main motivation is to always try and fulfill our customers' wants, we will get the same loyalty from our customers that we aim to show them.

tags: Crowdstorm, Competition, Featuritis, Wants, Needs